[Dryerase] TTT: LAPD Chief Bill Bratton launches a war in Los Angeles

[Michael Novick]

BILL BRATTON PICKED TO HEAD L.A.P.D.
WHY HIM? WHY HERE? WHY NOW?

by CopWatch L.A.

LA's new police Chief Bill Bratton and Mayor Jim Hahn are beating the drums 
about an increase in violence, shootings and killings in Los Angeles.

Hahn calls it a threat to the city's economic recovery and development. 
Bratton goes even farther, calling it a national security threat. They are 
calling for a "war on gangs" and arranging for federal forces to come into 
L.A. to help wage it. Their campaign has accelerated, rather than curbed, 
the propensity of the L.A.P.D. to use violence and deadly force against 
young Blacks.

At the same time, L.A. is silencing, undercutting, forcing out and firing 
the peace-makers -- truce activists with street credibility who are trying 
to re-establish the truce that had once dramatically reduced senseless 
killings among Black and Latino young people. The LAPD did its best to 
disrupt the truce a decade ago, and Bratton and Hahn clearly have no 
interest in seeing it reborn today. They are looking for scapegoats. As 
Twilight Bey, an activist with Communities in Support of the Gang Truce 
puts it, "They are camouflaging the problem of poverty by calling it 
crime." But Bratton and Hahn have no answers for growing poverty. That's 
why they attack Black youth instead.

Bratton wants people in L.A. to get angry, he says. But who does he want us 
angry at? The rich and powerful politicians and big business interests who 
are destroying health care, bleeding the schools, cutting jobs and forcing 
people into prison to work for nothing? No chance -- Bratton wants people 
to get angry at poor, beat-down Black teenagers and young adults!

Bratton said, at his first press conference in October upon being picked 
for chief by Hahn: "Where you have guns, you have drugs. Where you have 
drugs, you have youth. Where you have youth, you have gangs. Why treat them 
like four different diseases?" Where was the anger and outrage at a 
so-called public servant equating all young people of color, and in 
particular Black youth, with gangs, crime and violence -- and calling them 
all a disease!? Bratton is fueling the very sense of hopelessness that 
burns as self-destructive violence. L.A. is a new test case for a further 
ratcheting up of the police state.

Bratton has had three months to show us what his 'treatment' means. He 
wants to increase the LAPD by more than 30% to 9,000 cops. The Department 
wants to rebuild Parker Center, which would mean taking even more money 
from health care, after-school programs and other services. He wants to 
reinstate the old CRASH "anti-gang" units under a new name. But it will be 
with the same foot soldiers, the same cowboy culture,  that led to the 
widely publicized Rampart scandal and to the hidden atrocities of 77th, 
Hollenbeck, Southeast, Foothill and other divisions where the LAPD carried 
out the same bare-knuckles war. He has presided over about as many killings 
by the LAPD in three months as usually occur in a whole year --  and he has 
had nothing to say about them except, "Control your kids." The message to 
the ranks is clear, and it is the same one he delivered as chief  in New 
York, when arrests and brutality escalated to the point that Amnesty 
International issued a report condemning the NYPD for human rights 
violations. He has launched sweeps of the growing ranks of the homeless on 
Skid Row. He identifies panhandlers and graffiti as high priority targets 
in carrying out his war. He went to Israel to learn about 
"counter-terrorism" from the practitioners of state terrorism. He has 
appointed a "Homeland Security" adviser for the LAPD as part of Bush's 
domestic counter-insurgency operations. He created a mini-police state 
downtown for the October 22nd rally against police brutality.

Bratton has manipulated statistics to produce a sense of fear and hysteria 
that will build support for his get-tough policies. In January, 1995, as 
New York police commissioner, Bratton admitted to a group of business 
executives in Boston that, while crime in major cities is declining, fear 
of crime is still on the increase. ''Fear far surpasses the reality of 
crime,'' he said, according to the Boston Globe. The result of this 
unusually honest admission was manifested in NY when shortly after the end 
of his tenure, the NYPD made 35,000 more arrests than there were reported 
crimes! 100 Black and Latino youth a day arrested for no reason except 
"suspicion" and for no purpose except to criminalize them, and grease the 
skids for a trip, sooner or later, to state prison. Despite the hysteria 
and fear Bratton is trying to recreate here, comparing November and early 
December of 2002 to the same period a year ago shows a very similar pattern 
and number of shootings and killings. They are related less to gang 
activity and more to despair deepened by steadily worsening economic and 
social conditions. The holiday season increases self-destructive and 
criminal activity because this society rubs people's faces in their 
inability to buy the goodies and material possessions that supposedly 
measure human worth. A further year of war and economic devastation thanks 
to George Bush more than accounts for any minor differences between last 
year and this.

If Bill Bratton is the new shot-caller at LAPD, he is not calling the shots 
alone or in a vacuum. George W. Bush remembers quite well that the L.A. 
unrest of 1992 drove his daddy from office. While 'Dubya' pays off the 
mega-millionaires who put him in office with tax cuts and juicy military 
contracts, and wages an "endless war" that has already increased the level 
of violence within our own country, Bush is also overseeing a big boost in 
domestic police repression and militarization. He is using local police 
forces as enforcement arms of the federal government against immigrants, 
workers and young people in schools, colleges and on the streets. These new 
laws and procedures are necessary because the super-rich get their wealth 
and power from the people they hold down and rip off, and they know they 
have to intensify that exploitation and oppression. They need the kind of 
cop crackdown and fear-mongering that Bratton is a proven expert at, in 
order to keep people down. Look at LAX, where the feds used fear of 
"terrorism" to drive Black, Latino and Asian workers out, and now United 
Airlines is planning a bankruptcy to break its union contracts and drive 
down the wages of its workers. Bratton steps right up with a plan to absorb 
the LAX police into the LAPD.

Don't buy their lies. We have to regain our own political initiative, to 
liberate ourselves through our own efforts. It was the truce that 
drastically cut killings among young Blacks and Latinos. It  was the L.A. 
uprising in 1992 that cut back on the scourge of liquor stores in the Black 
and Latino communities. Today, we need to develop a campaign that targets 
the real culprits and criminals; that puts responsibility on the greedy, 
not the needy. We need a program of community self-defense and 
self-determination, not more cops. We need to demand an independent 
investigation of the recent barrage of police killings and shootings. We 
need to revive the call for community control of the police, a special 
prosecutor and elected civilian review board. And this must be linked to a 
program for de-funding the cops, the prisons and the military -- to a 
demand for using that money to provide decent housing and health care, 
quality training and jobs, and meaningful education for all poor and 
working people. Increase the peace!

To find out more about the Copwatch project in L.A., call 310-495-0299, or 
email copwatchla at yahoo.com